The Journal of Dora Damage (21 page)

Eventually I asked him about his life in America before setting foot on English soil. He told me he had been born there, which
banished the images I had envisaged of a small boy being transported from the tropics in the fetid hold of a vast ship. I
asked if his parents had been born there; again, the affirmative.

‘So how old were you when you realised you were a – a – when you realised that the choices available to others were not available
to you?’

‘As a Negro, I knew it all my life, even before I was captured. But it was a different kind o’ captivity. We knew the evils
of captivity in the South, but even the scorn we got in the streets, the curfews, the segregation, told us we were free, at
least. When I was caught, it all changed.’

‘Had you escaped?’

‘No, ma’am, not until recently.’ His courtesy was impeccable in the face of a woman who was not understanding him.

‘So when were you captured?’

‘July first, 1846.’

‘Which made you how old?’

‘Fourteen, ma’am.’

‘Please explain,’ I begged, when my obtuseness became unbearable even to me.

Finally he spoke without using my questions as prompts, and I hung on to every word for fear his flow would dry up.

‘I was going to a conference of preachers in Washington DC with my pop.’

‘Your father?’

‘Yes. Pop was a minister, a Methodist preacher. Mamma was a nurse. We lived just outside Baltimore, with my brothers and sisters.
So, we were going to DC. It was goin’ to take us two days to get there. Only we got ambushed, by poachers. They took us south
an’ auctioned us in Virginia.’ He spoke coolly.

‘Who bought you?’

‘Master Lucas. He was local to Virginia; Pop went to a Texan, a ranchman by looks of him.’

‘You were separated?’

‘Yes. You look surprised. I don’t wish to shock you, ma’am, but they take babes from their mothers. Least I was grown.’ I
heard his tone: do not pity me, it warned.

‘Did you ever see him again?’

‘No.’

‘So how do you know he is dead?’ I had never asked so many questions of a man, but the evenness of his honesty emboldened
me.

‘Mamma told me.’

‘So you saw your mother?’

He paused, and looked down at the floor with a quiet puffing of breath. He had had enough of me and my questions. I wished
I could have erased them all, but there were still so many I wanted to ask. How did he meet his mother again? What of his
siblings? Where was the law in all this? Could not the police have helped? If his kidnapping and sale was unlawful, why could
they not prosecute, convict, liberate?

But there were really no answers, only the cruel unfurlings of history against which this man was powerless. We sat with our
silences for several minutes, listening only to the sound of Jack’s hammer, which resonated a soothing sense of solidity and
reliability throughout the workshop.

And then came another shout from inside, and still I thought it might be my Lucinda in danger, less likely though it was these
days. It was, of course, Peter, lying far back in his chair, his eyes glazed, his throat rattling. He looked as if he were
dying: I felt his brow, and patted his cheeks, but his vital signs were good, his circulation still vigorous. He was not close
to death, I surmised, but it was if he had lost his way through the valley of the shadow of it, and was not enjoying the scenery.

‘There it is,’ he gurgled, and a long string of brown, laudanum-scented spittle descended from his mouth and onto his chest.

‘Is it?’

‘There she is.’

‘Is she? And what does she look like today?’

‘She’s got g – g – g – green sk – sk – skin.’

‘Is she a ghoul? A ghoul-ess?’

He nodded. ‘She’s suck – suck – sucking my s – s – soul from my – my – my –’

‘Your . . .?’

‘M – m – m – my m – m – mouth!’

‘It’s the opium, love. It just makes you worse.’ I spoke slowly and softly, as if to a child. ‘It takes the pain away, but
it brings you these dreadful women. It’s a choice you have to make.’

‘No, no, no. Stop! Stop!’

His hooded eyes rolled towards their horror as if compelled. But no matter how terrifying she may have seemed today, nothing
would stop him from taking his draught of laudanum tomorrow, and as often as possible thereafter.

I might, in the years prior to Din’s arrival at Damage’s, have agreed with Cardinal Manning and others that opium addiction
was slavery. But would the most reverent gentleman had made such an equation had he met a man like Din? Or known that William
Wilberforce himself was slave to the poppy? That, unlike sugar, poppies were cultivated by those who earned a wage and lived
in far better conditions than in the chains of the plantations, farms, and homesteads of America?

‘Have those men been back?’ Peter drooled.

‘No, love, they haven’t.’ I wasn’t sure which men he meant, but then his eyes opened, then narrowed into slits, and he started
to mutter.

‘Indolent dandies . . . Turkish baths . . . degenerate . . . British Empire . . . just like the Roman Empire . . . look at
the Ottoman Empire . . . bawds . . . lechery . . . villainy . . .’

And I knew which men he meant, and I knew that he knew, and I could say nothing more, only leave him to his rantings, which
flowed forth with surprising vehemence for one floating on a laudanum cloud.

I was sorry for him. His manliness had all but gone from him; he could only watch as his wife made an admirable living from
his business, working on material to which he felt she should not be exposed and from which he could not protect her, and
which further served to remind him of his failure as a real man. My husband had become a molly, a milksop; but it was not
his fault.

I tapped the window-pane to catch Lucinda’s attention as she played in the street, and waved at her. Then I returned to the
workshop and to Din, and I was surprised to see that he was ploughing the pages of Ovid’s
Amores
under Jack’s supervision.

‘With care, with care,’ I cried. ‘Do not cut away the margins! You will make an octavo of that quarto without care!’

Wordlessly, Din took it out of the plough and handed it to me to check. The print lay near perfect in relation to the spine
and head. I fingered the paper-shavings and held them to the light, to make my redundant point. The man was good.

‘These are pieces of history. This paper is a hundred years old.’ I should have stopped, but I could not help myself. ‘What
of these crisp edges, when the discolouration of time is removed? Old books need the most cautious handling.’

I handed the book back to Din, and I could see Jack smiling out of the corner of my eye. No doubt he was remembering the time
when Peter asked him if he were making a collection of margins, or whether he had been enervated by the author, so profligate
was he with the plough. Jack received ten of the best after that, but I doubt he felt touched by the birchen mysteries. I
was still daunted by the plough; Din had done very well, and was now demonstrating to me, not without pride, how well the
pages opened.

I struggled to find some words of praise to follow my tirade, so I simply nodded in appreciation, and watched Din continue
to open and close the book. Then it occurred to me that he was flicking through it, as if he were looking for something. It
was mildly comical, but I was not going to laugh at him, not after his earlier revelations to me. I waited for him to finish.
For the first time, I noticed the mark on his upper arm, protruding from his rolled-up sleeves. It was a word, written with
the same fuzzy dark lines as Sir Jocelyn’s tattoo. ‘LUCA
’, it said.

Suddenly I heard him exclaim, ‘Here it is,’ and he cleared his throat, and said something that I didn’t understand. I wondered
if he was speaking in an African tongue that might have been native to his family, a language they possibly spoke at home.

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, and he repeated it, but I was still no clearer. ‘Let me see,’ I asked, and held my hand out for
the book. He gave it to me, and I scanned the page for the quotation, but I was lost. His finger stretched across the paper
to show me the line I was after.

‘You can read?’ I asked, unaware in my amazement of how rude I sounded.

‘You mean, can I read
Latin?
’ he corrected.

‘And you can.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, unmoved by my insolence. ‘I can’t be a preacher’s son and not read.’

I tried to focus my eyes to where his finger pointed, and slowly read it out loud. ‘ “Suffer and harden: good growes by this
griefe, Oft bitter juice brings to the sick reliefe.” But this is not Latin, Din. This is Christopher Marlowe’s translation.’

‘I prefer the original. Marlowe was trapped by his couplets. Ovid is tellin’ us to endure, for some day our pain will benefit
us.’

‘Say it again, Din,’ I prompted, still confused.

‘
Perfer et obdura: dolor hic tibi proderit olim
.’

‘And your translation, again, if you will?’

‘Suffer and endure, for some day your pain will be of benefit.’

‘Some day your pain will be of benefit,’ I repeated, dazed. I stared at the page for a moment longer, before closing the book
and giving it to Jack to place between the boards of the standing press. I did not know what else to say. I turned slowly
and quietly to Din and said, ‘Your father taught you?’

‘No, ma’am. My mamma.’

‘Your mother.’

We lapsed into silence, until finally I could not help myself.

‘When did you see her again, Din?’

‘I been wonderin’ when you’d ask.’ He grinned, good-naturedly. ‘You women. She did what a mamma does. She waited until her
children’ – he pronounced it ‘chillen’ – ‘be old enough to care for themselves, then she came South to find us. Bad choice,
it was, but I can’t be blamin’ her. She didn’t find Pop. She heard talk that he be dead. She found me though. She found me.’

‘That must have been remarkable.’

‘Remarkable, yes, ma’am. And no, ma’am. She found me, an’ Master Lucas found her, and said that, she bein’ on his land, she
might as well join the rest of his sorry family. She worked in the fields for him until she fell down dead. Then I left. I’d
been plannin’ on runnin’ all the time I’d been there. I’d helped hundreds hit that railroad, but I couldn’t run and leave
Mamma, and she weren’t well enough to run with me. I helped hundreds of others to run, though.’

‘How did you help them?’

‘Bein’ a reader, and a writer. I wrote hundreds o’ letters an’ free-papers to be carried, documents that said things no one
could prove. That’s why they called me Din.’

‘Din? I don’t understand.’

‘Dudish Intelligent Nigger.’ He was smiling; was he playing with me?

‘Is that really why?’ I began, but it wasn’t an important question, not compared to what he was saying.

‘An’ I was goin’ to run once she died, but Master Lucas knew it, an’kept me chained and covered by dogs wherever I went. I
wanted to go to New Orleans an’ stow on a boat to England, I wanted to get to England all along, but then I caught the eye
of Lady Grenville, and she paid Master Lucas three times more than I was worth to any folk back home, so I got here anyways.’

‘How fortunate.’

‘Fortunate, yes, ma’am. But they was goin’ to do me in anyways, owin’ to my writing those letters. Master Lucas was goin’
to take the money and use it to put a price on my head. They all wanted me done, as they all knew it had been me who wrote
the letters.’

‘Couldn’t anyone else have done it?’

Din snorted. ‘You think they had a happy bunch o’ niggers who could read and write? Niggers are folk with no letters, ma’am.
We don’t have no books, don’t get no schoolin’, don’t
need
no learnin’. What were tough – almost tougher than not bein’ back home in Baltimore – was not the work, or the disrespect,
it was the not readin’. I had to hide it from them, or they woulda pulped me so hard I woulda lost most o’ my brains and been
more use as a vegetable for the pot. If you was a white boy, and you was found to be teachin’ a nigger, you’d be fined fifty
dollars and thrown in jail. If you was a nigger boy and you did the same . . . Well, but anyways, there weren’t none of them
kinds of white boys where we lived, so some boy had to do it.’

He paused, as if he were wondering whether he had taken out too much time and should be getting back to work. I just wanted
to keep listening to him. It was as if a window had opened between us, and we could hear each other breathing the same air
in our separate rooms. Jack’s hammer was beating, so I slipped inside its regular sound, and waited.

‘So I come to England,’ Din resumed eventually. ‘I come to England, where Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunel be buildin’ his railroads,
and tellin’ folks he wants all his drivers not to be able to read, cos only them who can’t read pay mind to things. Why, there’s
some truth in that, ma’am. I don’ see no disrespect there. Words can be traps, ma’am, and drivers don’ be needin’ traps. But
I see the traps
an
’ I can read.’

He spoke with pride. It was only later that I wondered whether I should have taken it as a warning.